Raspberry Pi add-on will help you build Lego Mindstorm robots

$45 BrickPi connects Pi to motors, sensors, and Lego bricks.

Using the Raspberry Pi to create robots is nothing new. But a new product called BrickPi seeks to make building Pi-based robots easier than ever with an add-on board and case that connect the Pi to Lego Mindstorm robot kits.

BrickPi is a Kickstarter project that has blown past its goal of $1,889 with more than $21,000 raised. The BrickPi add-on board "slides over your Raspberry Pi and connects, controls, and powers Mindstorm motors and sensors, and provides power to the Raspberry Pi." The add-on board's firmware is written in Arduino and the code is available online.

The second component of BrickPi is a case with holes that Lego pieces can snap into. Kickstarter contributions of $35 will get you the BrickPi itself, while $45 or more gets you the BrickPi and the case. Dexter Industries, the company making BrickPi, says deliveries will begin in August 2013.

With the BrickPi components and Lego Mindstorm pieces, you could build a tank:

BrickPi has four ports for connecting to Mindstorm sensors like the touch and color sensors and a gyroscope, and three motor ports to power Mindstorm motors. It's powered by a 9 volt battery, letting it run free from an outlet. The Pi's USB slots will let you integrate Wi-Fi connectivity, a webcam, or other peripherals.

There will be programming involved, but the folks behind BrickPi said they're going to make it as easy as possible with example programs and Python libraries.

"We've already written libraries so you can write something easily in Python," Dexter Industries said in a video about BrickPi. "All of the motors, sensors and other peripherals you would want to attach are there already and can be called with a single line of code from our library."

Dexter is also planning to write a Scratch programming library to help kids learn how to program on the BrickPi.

BrickPi reminds us of Sparki, an Arduino-based robot designed to help beginners program robots. For more on BrickPi, check out this video:

looks like, which is pretty damn neat. The current NXT is pretty old and dumb, and although the new version this fall looks pretty cool, it still won't be a general purpose computer. I think I might pick one of these up.

This is pretty cool, it's exciting to live in a time when science fiction is coming true every day. Today, it's lego robots. Some people think that in a decade we'll have people living on Mars (I'll happily support this goal and be curious about the teams progress.....from the comfort of my living room that I can leave anytime I want to go outside.....).

To see technology get commoditized like this is really, really cool. My only disappointment is with the pervasiveness of Python....you can pry my curly-braces from my cold, dead hands!

looks like, which is pretty damn neat. The current NXT is pretty old and dumb, and although the new version this fall looks pretty cool, it still won't be a general purpose computer. I think I might pick one of these up.

It'll also be a whole lot cheaper than buying an NXT or EV3 (when it comes out) brick.

This is pretty cool, it's exciting to live in a time when science fiction is coming true every day. Today, it's lego robots. Some people think that in a decade we'll have people living on Mars (I'll happily support this goal and be curious about the teams progress.....from the comfort of my living room that I can leave anytime I want to go outside.....).

To see technology get commoditized like this is really, really cool. My only disappointment is with the pervasiveness of Python....you can pry my curly-braces from my cold, dead hands!

This is pretty cool, it's exciting to live in a time when science fiction is coming true every day. Today, it's lego robots. Some people think that in a decade we'll have people living on Mars (I'll happily support this goal and be curious about the teams progress.....from the comfort of my living room that I can leave anytime I want to go outside.....).

To see technology get commoditized like this is really, really cool. My only disappointment is with the pervasiveness of Python....you can pry my curly-braces from my cold, dead hands!

Since it runs Linux, it is highly likely that it will be able to run other code as well. I don't think there is official word from LEGO that it will be supported, but it doesn't seem like much of a leap.

So you'll likely have a choice, just like you do with the NXT brick, to use the graphical programming language or to not use it.

To see technology get commoditized like this is really, really cool. My only disappointment is with the pervasiveness of Python....you can pry my curly-braces from my cold, dead hands!

Yes, I don't get the love affair with Python.

As mainstream scripting languages go Python is relatively accessible to newcomers, at least at the most superficial level. It gets hellishly knotty once you go deeper (its class/object system is insanely baroque down at the double-scores level), whereas the JavaScript runtime, say, turns out to be relatively clean and simple once you get into it (being objects all the way down). OTOH, JavaScript has much more complicated punctuation rules which make it slower and more frustrating to penetrate in the first place. Python's extensive library support also means that Python users can go some considerable distance in all sorts of different task-driven directions before it runs out of steam, whereas JavaScript's libraries are all focused on task-driven growth in one particular direction (web development).

That said, I would still classify Python, JS and the other mainstream languages as all horribly over-complicated and thoroughly rotten for fundamental learning, and less than optimal for practical work as a result. And supposed LOGO successors like Scratch are no better; while the presentation may be superficially different, they screw up the base pedagogy in much the same ways. But that's a longer debate, which I won't get into in this thread since that's a software, not hardware, issue. It's just a shame that while hardware hacking kit is advancing leaps and bounds in the enlightening and enabling of DIY tool creation, the software side grows ever more mired in wholly reductionist, mechanistic thinking and crude, unquestioning tool usage: rote Pavlovian button-pushing propagated as the highest form of "achievement".

All I can say here is, by 'eck, wish we'd 'ad 'ardware kit like this when I were a nipper, but back then we had to etch and wire our own hand-drawn PCBs and hook 'em t'school lighting all by ourselves without frying t'bugger in process, walking forty miles in snow uphill both ways...